Wardrobe Architect Week 5: Your Colour Story

This week’s Wardrobe Architect exercise is about coming up with a colour story for your wardrobe. To quote the original post:

“Color is an extremely powerful force in our lives.

Color affects our mood. It affects how food tastes to us. It affects how and what we buy. The color of the pills we take can even affect the efficacy of the medication within. That is what a powerful psychological effect color has over us.

Not only is color a potent communication tool, but it’s also a nuanced one. We are capable of perceiving a huge number of colors, each one arousing a slightly different feeling in us.

Perhaps you can’t articulate why a certain shade of apricot feels good to you, but a slightly yellower shade does not. Somewhere deep within your mind, a combination of biology, culture, and context makes that decision before you are even aware of it.

It creates a visceral, physical response that you experience as emotion.” (source)

I pretty much already knew what my palette would be, but it’s hard to pin down exact shades of blue (for example), so it did take longer than I thought it would. Also I struggled to come up with 12 colours! Looking through my handmade wardrobe, though, I’ve pretty much stuck to these colours, which really surprised me. I thought I was a bit more all over the place, but it seems I’ve always kept to a fairly limited palette!

I did pin some pictures on my Wardrobe Architect Pinterest board to help me narrow these colours down. I tried to avoid pinning pictures of clothes, though, so I wouldn’t pin things thinking I liked the colour, when actually I liked the silhouette. What strikes me is that this palette looks quite bright, but I feel like I dress quite boringly a lot of the time, so that needs rectifying. I also need more coral in my wardrobe. I really do like it but when I made my lace dress and jacket for the wedding I went to last year, I initially wanted a coral jacket and not a mustard one but I couldn’t find any fabric in the shade of coral I like – and it turns out coral is a word that means anything from pale pink to bright orange!

I feel like these colours are mostly the ones I think I look okay in – I would never put red on my colour palette for instance. Do you find you’re naturally drawn to clothes in colours that suit you?